Bidirectional Modeling of Surface Winds and Significant Wave Heights in the Caribbean Sea

Abstract

Though the ocean is sparsely populated by buoys that feature co-located instruments to measure surface winds and waves, their data is of vital importance. However, due to either minor instrumentation failure or maintenance, intermittency can be a problem for either variable. This paper attempts to mitigate the loss of valuable data from two opposite but equivalent perspectives: the conventional reconstruction of significant wave height (SWH) from Caribbean Sea buoy-observed surface wind speeds (WSP) and the inverse modeling of WSP from SWH using the long short-term memory (LSTM) network. In either direction, LSTM is strongly able to recreate either variable from its counterpart with the lowest correlation coefficient (r2) measured at 0.95, the highest root mean square error (RMSE) is 0.26 m/s for WSP, and 0.16 m for SWH. The highest mean absolute percentage errors (MAPE) for WSP and SWH are 1.22% and 5%, respectively. Additionally, in the event of complete instrument failure or the absence of a buoy in a specific area, the Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) wave model is first validated and used to simulate mean and extreme SWH before, during, and after the passage of Hurricane Matthew (2016). Synthetic SWH is then fed to LSTM in a joint SWAN—LSTM model, and the corresponding WSP is reconstructed and compared with observations. Although the reconstruction is highly accurate (r2 > 0.9, RMSE < 1.3 m/s, MAPE < 0.8%), there remains great room for improvement in minimizing error and capturing high-frequency events.